Lullaby to Ballarat
by gibbsheroic27
Summary: Charlie has always loved watching his father play the piano.


A/N: This is dedicated to the wonderful miss-nettles-wife, whose Charlie Davis fics inspired me to attempt one of my own. This should probably be taken as an AU, considering how much backstory I give Charlie, and the probable alterations I make to the characters and timeline. Also, I realize that snow in Ballarat and Melbourne is a pretty rare occurrence, but rain didn't seem to have the same emotional impact somehow, so please suspend your weather disbelief with me : )

The heat was searing. No other word could describe it, burning and agonizing not even coming close to capturing the intensity of the wall of heat and flame that seemed to encase every square inch of Charlie Davis' body.

The flames seemed to lick at every inch of his skin, every pore and orifice, reigniting a fresh stream of unremitting suffering with every ebb and flicker.

Charlie had never realized before that agony has a limit, the end of which is a foggy sort of quiet that seems almost blissful by compare to what has come before. He wonders if this is what death feels like.

CDCD

Charlie was in bed with pneumonia when the telegram arrived. His mother had been up all hours, the drain of the war on medical help felt as keenly in Melbourne as across most of the globe. Charlie lay quietly in his bed for the first hours and days, gazing steadfastly at the map spread out across his wall, little white pins fastened carefully in concentric rings across the fields of Europe, carefully blocking out his mother's admonishments about playing responsibly and "You are nine years old now Charles, is it too much to expect you to be self-sufficient enough to know when to come inside from the snow."

His mother's recitation trails off around the morning of the fifth day, when his fever spikes higher into the low hundreds and reality begins to distort the blues and whites of the map into a sea of red.

The knock at the door came the morning his fever finally broke, a week in, his ragged mother opening the door to the incomprehensible inevitable that is about to become their reality.

Charlie was asleep when the knock came. He was asleep when the telegram was delivered into shaking, sweat stained hands. He was asleep when an aborted cry ripped through the house, rousing his two little brothers from their careful quarantine at the far end of their narrow but long flat.

Charlie was asleep when the news comes that his father was killed in action a week earlier, right around the time his sons dashed out into the rare sight of snow in Melbourne, his oldest forgetting his cap in his haste to chase after his brothers holding theirs in his small hands.

Charlie's mother will later tell people that her eldest son was always a serious child.

No one's left alive to remember a time when she was wrong.

CDCD

Peter Davis was a commercial painter by profession, and his carefully preserved letters, singed at the edges in places and just smoky enough to not quite be illegible in the years that follow, will tell his sons that becoming a soldier was the greatest thing he ever did in his entire life.

Apart from being their father.

Charlie Davis would disagree. Even nearly twenty years later, quietly sipping a slow burning lemon tea in a cozy parlour on the outskirts of Ballarat while Mattie poured over books and Jean carefully completed a new pink blanket for her granddaughter, the sound of a piano would always remind Charlie of his father.

His mother once said the keys themselves wanted to get up and dance when Petey Davis played them.

She never said it again after he died.

CDCD

Charlie knows he's lucky. He was seven when his father went to war, old enough to have tossed a ball around the yard on a summer evening. Old enough to have carefully learned how to roll a wall of undripped paint at his father's knee. Old enough to know how to whistle just like his Da did. Old enough to remember his father.

Old enough to remember what they all lost at the hands of a German tank.

Not old enough to remember his father's face, or voice, or laugh.

Not old enough to learn how to make piano keys dance.

Not old enough to not miss him.

CDCD

Charlie Davis has had a plan since his sixteenth birthday, since the local Sergeant hauled his brother back to their mother one too many times and she shut the door on them. Since Paul and Jeremy were old enough to look for a father figure and find their big brother wanting.

Ballarat was never part of that plan.

CDCD

His mother remarries when Charlie is twelve, swept up in the excitement of the end of the war and the promise of a steady income to support her rapidly growing sons. Sid is solid and dependable and everything Petey Davis wasn't.

He's also a mean bastard when he drinks, which is an infrequent but perpetual occurrence that becomes the stay around which Charlie's teenage years revolve.

Sid rarely leaves bruises, is at least relatively undemanding when sober, treats his mother semi-decently most of the time, and puts food on the table, but that's the end of his redeeming qualities.

It's enough of a combination to produce two rebellious trouble makers, the younger Davis boys renowned throughout half of Melbourne before they reach puberty.

Every smashed window and stolen sweet makes the wrinkles bracketing his mother's mouth a shade deeper, every call from the police cause Sid's bouts with drink to become slightly more frequent.

Paul is fourteen to Charlie's sixteen when he leaves home for good, the first bruise Sid has ever given either of the younger Davis boys standing a livid testament to the ruin the war made of their lives.

Charlie is the only one who tries to stop him, heaven only knows what he thought he would accomplish, Paul hasn't listened to his big brother since before the war ended, but giving up has never been Charlie's problem, so he ends standing in the rain outside the back alley of their cramped apartment, desperately trying to persuade his brother that their family is worth staying for.

He probably should have expected the belligerent, "What family?"

Charlie isn't entirely sure that he disagrees, so all he says is, "Us, me and Jeremy and you, we need to stick together Pauly."

He knew it was the wrong thing to say before the words really formed, but he's just shy of seventeen, and he really doesn't have a clue what he's doing.

Paul actually hesitates for a moment, Charlie will always be haunted by that pause, will always remember what his brother says next. Well, yells next.

Charlie's never heard his rather brooding brother raise his voice, that's always been more Jeremy's thing, but he's pretty sure half of Melbourne hears Paul this time.

"You weren't there Charlie!" The quiet is thick enough to pear in two, which is exactly what the follow up does. "You weren't there."

It takes Paul less than a minute to say, less time than it takes him to vanish from Charlie's life, but it's the last thing his brother ever says to him, and it will always haunt Charlie.

Mostly because he knows he wasn't wrong.

It took Charlie nearly five months to recover from his bout of Pneumonia, five months that transformed the family only he's really old enough to remember they ever really were.

Five months in which his mother, their mother, sort of forgot how to be a mother at all.

Which kinda left his brothers with all of two options, and quite frankly, Charlie sometimes suspects Sid was probably the better of those two.

And what does that say about them all really.

A letter arrives from the Navy a month later informing Mrs. Parker that her middle son has enlisted for the foreseeable future.

Charlie sets about becoming a copper the next day.

It takes him three years to figure out how to accomplish that, and by that time, he's sort of lost Jeremy too.

CDCD

If Charlie takes anything away from his childhood, it is an ingrained need to follow the rules, as strictly as possible.

It probably started somewhere between a stolen moment in the snow and an army telegram, but Charlie never really thinks about it too closely.

He is twenty-five before he has cause to break a rule again. Twenty-five, and the golden boy of the Melbourne police department, already groomed for junior detective despite not even being a sergeant yet.

Twenty-five, and standing between a superior officer telling him to look the other way and a little girl with enough bruises across her face her skin looks blue.

Hesitation thy name is not Davis.

Charlie refuses to look the other way.

Three days later, he's in Ballarat.

CDCD

Charlie gets a letter from his mother shortly after Lawson comes back, the first in the entire eleven months since he was banished to Ballarat.

It's short, and rather to the point.

Paul's ship went down. Your brother is dead. Please don't come to the funeral.

It takes Charlie less than a minute to realize it was written by Jeremy, not his mother. The please gives it away mostly.

It takes one hurried telephone call to determine that was as deliberate as he already knew it to be.

He doesn't go to the funeral. Mostly because the letter didn't say when it was.

CDCD

Charlie goes for a run early the next morning. It's a weekend, and Munro is keeping everyone on edge enough that nobody misses him for the whole day. He tells himself that's the reason. Not that they wouldn't have looked anyway.

The cough starts a day later, minor enough at first to easily hide from Lucien, even living two walls away from the man.

Mattie notices five days in, but he fobs her off with promises to rest up and drink more tea.

Charlie's always been good at telling people what they want to hear.

Except apparently not as good as he thought.

"Charlie." It's the same tone the Doc uses with his more stubborn patients, the same tone he used on Charlie all those months ago when everything was even newer, when he was even newer and greener, when Jack Beasley ran into their lives and proved to Charlie just how much he doesn't fit.

Charlie both loved and hated that tone, because it made him feel all of about six. Which somehow meant it sort of made him feel happy. Feel loved.

Right now, not so much, because the Doc's stare could probably level the whole building they're standing in, which wouldn't be a total loss because Munro and Hobart are both currently in it, and Charlie thinks he saw a Tyneman slinking around somewhere earlier, so that's a plus.

Still, Charlie lasts even less time than he did the last round, which means that less than ten seconds after Blake strode up to Charlie's desk to perch his black bag rather purposefully on top of his type writer keys, Charlie's slowly levering his cough achy body up from the desk and edging towards Blake's rather insistent outstretched hand.

What the hand was for, he never really gets to find out, because the world abruptly greys out, so abruptly he could swear the floor feels oddly soft when it rushes up to meet his face.

CDCD

Charlie is searing. There's no other word for it, not burning or flaming or catching alight, not hot or sweaty or aching. Searing.

Time seems to lose all meaning. It's a comfortingly familiar feeling, broken uncomfortably by moments of sound and heat and light, faint voices and wet and pulling sensations.

Whispers that sound equal parts lost in a fog bank and echoing into his ears through a trumpet.

Snatches of things that might have been words once, the meaning of which he can no longer recall.

"Char- Eas- Tha-ad." "Swall" Eas" "Is alr-Iv-gty- Char- Char-Charl" At times, he thinks someone keeps switching the channel on the radio and he wishes they would stop, but he can't remember how to ask.

At others, he thinks he cries because he can't hear anything at all.

Sometimes, Charlie thinks he feels a hand on his cheek, caressing and kind. But that can't be right, his mother doesn't have the time anymore.

Other times, there's gentle fingers in his hair, a strong grip holding his chin, pressing a cup to his mouth, a cool pressure on his searing forehead, shading his aching clenched eyes, but that can't be right either, because he's never been sick when his father was home.

Days or months in, everything suddenly stops, the heat, the sound, the light, the touch.

Charlie wonders if this is what it feels like to be dead.

CDCD

Cracking his eyes open the evening his fever finally breaks is probably one of the most painful things Charlie can ever remember doing.

Blake is the first thing he sees, a blurry blob of unmistakable concern, perched carefully above Charlie on the comforter he could have sworn was on the wall of the Doc's studio.

A somehow familiar, cool hand presses to his forehead, blue eyes staring into his own with a gently measured, "Well, there you are."

Charlie presses his eyes shut with more strength than he suspects he really should be able to accomplish at this point, and tries very hard to not choke on air thick with Deja vu.

He fails right into a spectacular coughing fit, and tries to pretend the tears scorching down his cheeks are from the struggle to breath, and not the suffocatingly gentle "Easy Charlie, I've got you, you're alright lad" burning hot against his ear, which has somehow ended up pressed securely to Blake's waistcoat, and oh look the buttons are unmatched how odd and that's pretty much when time loses all meaning for the second time that week.

CDCD

Lawson later tells him he was unconscious for six days, three of which he spent with a fever so high Blake actually told Lawson to call his mother.

Neither of the men ever elaborates on whether there was any answer.

It takes Charlie two weeks to think of asking why he's in the Doc's studio and not a hospital, two weeks in which he sees more of Blake than he's seen of his mother in the past ten years, two weeks in which Mrs. Beasley becomes Jean and Mattie discovers his favourite book is also Pride and Prejudice.

Two weeks in which Charlie allows himself to feel like the part of something larger than himself, for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Two weeks to ask what happened after he collapsed, directly into Blake's arms according to a disturbingly pleased Hobart he discovers much later, and there goes the soft floor explanation he guesses.

Two weeks before he gets up the courage to say this.

"Doc, if you give me anymore tea, I'm pretty sure I'll drown in it." True to form, this earns Charlie little more than a subtly quirked eyebrow and a rather dry "Well, it beats suffocating Charlie, so drink up."

And there's that commanding tone again. Charlie wonders what kind of officer Blake made. He bets it was a pretty spectacular sight. And when did he start looking up to this man.

Six months ago, he's pretty sure he didn't even like him.

He's still not sure he likes him some days, off in his own little world regardless of the consequences to anyone.

Except somewhere in the past year, that world slowly expanded to include Charlie, bringing their number up to all of four, or five now he guesses since Lawson should be a permanently returned addition by the end of the month Charlie reckons.

He chokes down roughly a thimbleful of tea before returning to his original intent. "Doc, why am I here?"

Thimbleful of tea or not he still sounds alarmingly like a croaky frog, and Blake shifts with a frown from his careful monitoring of Charlie's continued tea consumption to feel gently along his throat.

Charlie tries really hard not to lean into the touch. He nearly succeeds.

Blake steadfastly avoids looking Charlie in the eye. "It was closer than the hospital."

Which is blatantly untrue, and makes rather little sense besides, even to Charlie's fever addled brain, except he's had the misfortune of going inside the Ballarat hospital before, so he can't really muster up the energy to call the Doc on it. Any of it.

"Rest Charlie." The command is back, along with the soothing touch, so Charlie gives up and leans into it. And rests, more peacefully than he can ever quite remember doing.

CDCD

Charlie never asks what happened during those six days he mostly lost to a fever high enough to leave him with lingering memory problems on bad days.

Blake does a pretty good imitation of a mother hen in the weeks that follow, almost complete with clucking, so Charlie can never quite bring himself to ask about it. Or to ask him to stop either.

He never asks if he said anything either, but the Doc suddenly starts playing a lot of waltzes, and Charlie can think of very few ways that the man could have discovered they were his father's favourite type of music.

Sleeping at Blake's gets a whole lot easier after that, early hours wake ups aside.

CDCD

Charlie leaves the letter from his mother in Blake's desk drawer three months after he's officially certified fully recovered from pneumonia for the second time in his life.

Blake never mentions it, but Charlie never gets a letter from his mother again. He never asks if this is because she never writes one.

CDCD

Charlie finds the simple memorial plaque two years into his banishment to Ballarat.

It's hidden in the back corner of the church, preserved for all time. It simply reads: Paul Davis. May he rest in peace.

Charlie burns his permanently prepared transfer request the next day.

CDCD

Charlie's been up from his sick bed for all of three hours when he carefully stumbles into the den, pointedly ignoring the blazing stare he knows awaits him from the wall by the doorway to the hall. Blake kept him in bed for far longer than was necessary in Charlie's opinion, even going so far as to tie his ankles gently to the bedframe on more than one occasion.

Nonetheless, three and a half weeks after his fever had finally broken even the Doc had to concede that Charlie was well enough to finally leave his bedroom. After a nap of course.

Hours of skilfully drugged tea induced wholly unnecessary bed rest later, and Charlie finally made his escape from his sickbed. The house was suspiciously quiet, so he really shouldn't be surprised to find the Doc lying in wait, blocking any possible escape beyond the cozy blazing heat of the Den.

Blake needn't have bothered really, the snow reaching over a foot thick in most places beyond the cozy plantation house. Charlie isn't the sort to need to learn a lesson twice, particularly one that has been stamped into his brain since before his tenth birthday.

Blake heaves a resigned sigh, breaking Charlie's train of thought enough to alert him to the fact that the Doc is less than an inch from slinging Charlie's arm around his shoulder, prompting Charlie to make an abrupt bid for freedom, in this case in the means of a rather ungraceful list towards the rather comfy looking armchair to their immediate right.

Charlie is starting to realize what he's known all along, that Blake has a heart roughly the size of the entire Australian continent, that can be as soft as the freak winter snow gracing the windows in haphazard gusts, because he turns the list into an elegant deposit of Charlie into the safety of the inviting armchair, complete with blanket, hot water bottle, and carefully measured lemon tea and escape had never really been a possibility at all, had it.

Charlie suspects that the tea indicates no lecture will be forthcoming at the present moment, something which is almost instantly confirmed by Blake's affectionately exasperated, "At least in here I can keep a good eye on you Charlie, make sure you don't set back your recovery yet again," complete with accompanied patent shoulder pat.

Honestly, Charlie finds the entire thing rather grossly unfair and ridiculous, considering Blake seemed to have taken up near permanent residence on the foot of his bed over the last month or so, and that the Doc pauses only long enough beside Charlie to carefully take his temperature and pulse and nudge the tea closer with a fond "Come on Charlie, I know your throat's still rather raw but drink up, there's a good lad" before returning to his customary den seat on the piano bench against the far wall, facing away from both Charlie and the oncoming snow.

The first notes of a soft waltz fill the room in a disjointed patter, keeping time with the gusts of window rattling snow against the fragile panes. Charlie inhales the tangy scent of lemon and disinfectant, allowing his eyes to drift to a slowly fluttering close.

As he floats off, he could swear the snowflakes outside the window seemed to dance for just a moment.

CDCD

Charlie's been living with the Doc and Mattie and Jean for nearly six months when they finally get Lawson back, properly and for good. It's been nearly two weeks since Munro was subpoenaed back to divisional HQ, and nearly a week since Jean and the Doc came back from Adelaide, Jean's hand significantly shinier than when they left, and it's really the first chance they've had to celebrate all that has happened.

Officially, they are toasting Lawson's reinstatement as Super. Naturally, Lucien leads the toast. To Lawson, to his friends, to Jean. To family.

Five glasses clink together hard enough to break. None of them do.

The Doc often plays in the den after dinner, which Lawson seems to be at more and more of the time since his return, and tonight he's in fine form at the Piano keys.

Charlie's on his second glass of bubbly at this point, and feeling lighter than he can ever quite remember. Outside the first signs of spring are thawing out the trees, the snow a distant memory, and he can't help but gaze at the ivory under the Doc's fingers, as transfixed now as he was twenty years ago in a bar dive in Melbourne.

Lucien Blake is probably the most observant man in Australia, so it really shouldn't surprise Charlie, but somehow the quiet, soft utterance of his own name, the name his father gave him, startles him badly enough to spill the last of his champagne, for all that it passes the Doc's lips the same way it always does, like a fond caress to a loving son. From a loving father.

Lawson's chuckle mingles with the pleasant sound of Mattie's laughter at some joke Jean just attempted to tell, and for a second Charlie almost misses Blake's words for the second time in as many minutes. "Do you play Charlie?"

The question should serve to remind Charlie how short a time he's really known these people, how short a time he's spent in their midst, how little they truly know about this serious boy from Melbourne who never wanted to come to Ballarat in the first place. Never wanted to be here.

But somehow, all it does is make him feel more warm than all the Champagne in the world could. "I never really got the chance to learn how, Doc." There is a wealth of meaning behind that statement, and maybe he'll tell them about it one day, but for now, for now, Blake's holding out a hand towards him, beckoning him closer to his side at the bench.

"Well, no time like the present Charlie." Caution is often confused with hesitation Charlie finds, but while he is apparently one of the most cautious people Lawson has ever met, hesitation has never been a failing of his and so he makes it to Blake's side before the man's other hand even leaves its place at the keys.

Sitting carefully beside the Doc, keenly aware of the interested gazes on the back of his neck, Charlie glances awkwardly to his left, meeting Blake's gently smiling blue eyes that hold no small amount of amusement. At Blake's gesture, Charlie slowly puts his hands tentatively on the keys before him, memory lapping around the edges of his consciousness for precious seconds before slipping away unidentified.

His confusion must show rather plainly, because Blake allows a slow chuckle to escape and reaches out to carefully reposition Charlie's fingers on the keys. Pressing their overlapping index fingers down on a white key in the middle of the expanse of ivory and polished matte black, he turns his steady gaze to meet Charlie's serious expression, and intones with carefully measured wisdom, "We always start at middle C."

The note seems to echo for so long that Charlie could almost swear that in the distance he could hear someone dancing.

CDCD

"Charlie! Charlie, come on boy, open your eyes!" The voice seemed to Charlie to echo from a great distance, as if speaking through muffled cloth, but the gruff chocolatey quality was still unmistakable in its intensity.

"Charlie!" The voice was becoming more insistent, gentle hands gripping powerfully around his shoulders, support his weight off the blissfully beckoning floor. "Doc?" The barest whisper seem to take a great effort to force out, as painful coughs sliced through the numbing fog surrounding his vision.

"That's it Charlie, that's good. Come on boy, stay awake!"

According to every authority figure from Charlie's ninth year up, he was the most well behaved, rule abiding child anyone was ever likely to encounter. Funny, no one ever thought to inquire why that was. But for all that, Charlie finds himself slipping into unconsciousness, even though he's had worse, even though he could probably hold on if he tries.

The voice followed him down, fading out far louder than it faded in. And for the first time in his life, little Charlie Davis, the boy who always obeyed every order or instruction, disobeyed.

Because he knew it would be okay.


End file.
